The sand covered streets are huge and wide before her, stretching on endlessly. The sandstone buildings reach high, high, high into the sky, stretching toward the sun above. Everything is too big and too far. She walks but the sunlit road in front of her never gets any closer. She walks, but the buildings at her side never seem to change. Everything is too big.

She stops, and her legs are shaking and she can’t seem to stop them. They wobble like she doesn’t know how to use them and her skin is stretched too tightly over her ribs and her breathing is ragged. Something hot and warm falls onto her cheek, carving a path down the rose of her skin. Then more, one after the other, until soon it is a cascade. Her mouth opens as if calling for help but no sound comes out. It is quiet except for the rapid, hummingbird beat of her heart and the sound of her dying breaths in her ears.

Dying?

A shadow blocks out the sun, and the man it belongs to is too tall. The darkness cast by his form falls over her, consuming her. She looks up and sees a seraph (or a monster?) wearing a gilded crown. She falls into the black pit of his eyes, empty and suffocating. She falls, and falls, and then there is no more endless street, no more buildings stretching high above her. Her knees do not wobble but her bones, they ache. There is no more her. There is just the barren spaces created inside her, waiting to be filled. She is hollowed out. Who is she? Who is she?

Who is she?

She no longer remembers.

Somewhere through the darkness, somewhere out there, there is the feel of cool metal against her flesh, tight and binding. There is a snapping sound, like a clasp being done; slipping into place. Locking—not tight, not with a key or a spell, but it is like the door of a cell sliding closed. Echoing, shattering. Final.

Teiran wakes up, and the world is dark and quiet. There is a sheen to her skin, hot and uncomfortable, and her heart beats too quickly and there is something, a thought, a memory, slipping away into the unreachable corridors of her mind. She does not go after it. The girl stands and her legs do not wobble and her bones do not ache but there is something in her eyes. Something haunted, just beneath the veneer of cold steel. In the dark she slips on a hood, white as the moon, and for comfort straps two daggers to her sides.

The streets are filled with blood and screams and fire when she enters them. Smoke soars high into the air, blotting out the sky for miles. There is no sky, only blackness. Empty and suffocating. The screams echo strangely, as if down a long tunnel, full of pain and agony. The fire is bright and hot against her already too-hot skin but somehow it does not burn when it brushes its fingers across her body. Teiran turns away from it, from the ringing in her ears and the sound of glass cracking under pressure.

She needs to get out of here, and she slips through alleyways and finds herself in the desert. Teiran stops, stands rigid against the sand around her. She looks back. There is no fire, no smoke, no screams. She turns and walks away. A breeze stirs the sands, and she moves like a ghost: leaving no trace, making no sound. Teiran walks without thinking about where she is going. She walks, with the stars shining in the open sky and her sage green eyes looking but not seeing.

At some point, her hooves hit solid stone, and when she looks up she realizes she has walked to the canyon and stands on the threshold of the Colosseum. It is not her first time here, and surely it will not be her last. She doesn’t think of all the other times. Not of when it had appeared as if placed by Solis’ hand, of finding a girl made of strawberries and cream, of confronting a titan with a heart surrounded by teeth.

There are cracks in her surface as she enters, and a shivering passes over her skin, wild and unbidden. She doesn’t see the man standing there in the middle of the ring at first, made of mahogany and ivory. Even when she does, she doesn’t pull her knife like she usually might, for security. For safety. For warning. She peers at him out from under a golden trimmed hood and, after a moment, realizes she recognizes him if only just.

The sight of him makes her think of cold and snow and boiling tempers. The sight of him makes her think of smoke and fire and screams and she isn’t sure why, when they hadn’t been there at all. Not this time. “You.” It is all she says, whether or not it is enough. Whether or not he, too, will recognize her.

"Speaking."

He sees a girl made from hardened steel, molded and quenched into a frightful weapon of war. But on this night, Teiran feels strangely like glass, spiderwebbed through with cracks. There is a shivering dragging its way across her skin, but it appears that he does not see it. Whether because of the dark, or whether he simply doesn’t look for it she doesn’t know. Regardless, the soldier finds herself grateful for it. And for awhile they just stare at each other. No words, no sound but their breathing.

She takes a few steps further into the Colosseum, and her mind remembers wobbling, weak legs. At first Teiran doesn’t enter the inner ring. She pauses among the stands, among the sandstone columns and arches that reach up and up and up. How can a place sprung from the cliffs of Elatus in mere hours be so ancient, with crevices and cracks lining the walls, pieces missing here and there, sand long settled on surfaces? She still has not fought within these walls, has not put to test their timeworn history. One day, perhaps.

She can’t be sure if the shouts in her ears are the memories of this place in its prime, or the screams of the dying. She blinks, and if there is another fine crack in her surface she doesn’t draw attention to it. No, her sage green eyes do not leave the amethyst-eyed man, her caution never resting even has he glances over her attire. He, unlike her, is unarmed, even despite the horn on his forehead. She has no fear of him. She has no fear—but then why, for a moment, do his eyes looks pitch as as a moonless, starless night?

When he eyes up her weapons, she grasps the left dagger and pulls it from its sheath. The gold snake coils around the obsidian blade grip, holding a gem in its mouth the same color as her eyes. For a moment she just holds it, balancing it in her hand, watching the dim light reflect off the serpent scales.

Then, she throws it.

“Catch,” is the only warning Jahin has to prepare himself if he wants to stop the spinning weapon from accidentally stabbing him. There’s no real force behind the throw, no intention for it to hit. He could simply step back and allow it to clatter to the sandstone floor in front of him. She hopes he won’t

Why did she throw it? Teiran can’t say except that, maybe, she hopes he will give her a fight to stop her from thinking about a girl with hollow eyes. Maybe he will give her a fight, and it will bring back the hard steel veneer of her that is cracking and bending under pressure. Maybe he will give her a fight, and it will make her feel alive. She nears him again, her steps slow and measured. There are no wobbling knees here, no dying breaths, and she pushes back her hood, letting it pool about her shoulders.

And then she gives him the only name she has ever known, while her mind whispers. ‘Who are you? Who are you?’

“Teiran.”

"Speaking."

Teiran watches Jahin inspect—admire?—the dagger and she thinks of the one that she hadn't tossed. He doesn't say it, but if he thinks that knife is lightweight then he would be surprised by its apparent double sheathed on her ride side. It is heavier. Strangely, to anyone who might hold them both, without reason. But the heavier has a secret imbedded in its makeup: an enchantment.

Any weapon is dangerous, whether in the hands of someone who knows how to use it or not. Perhaps more so in the case of the latter. But a weapon with magic in its being can make it only that much more powerful. Especially in the hands of one privy to that secret who can wield it to the full spectrum of its ability. Of her dagger, Teiran is the only one who knows. The only one who can command it.

‘It's beautiful,’, he says. And, ‘it suits you.’ And the soldier snags on it, for some reason. The words get twisted up in the hairline fractures of her facade. Jahin tosses the dagger back and she barely catches it, if not for years of conditioning and her own instincts. It suits you. Teiran looks at the dagger clutched tightly now in her grip and wonders what he means by that.

That it is deadly? Serpentine? Crafted by another's hand?

That it is beautiful?

She puts the dagger away from her sight and her sage green eyes, strangely bright in the moonlight, make their way back to the unicorn's face. He is watching her and suddenly she thinks that he can see all of the missing pieces in her on this night, where the ghostly parts of her past slink through like wildcats in a jungle. They hunt, but they only prey and feast upon her mind. They toy at the edges of the memories that aren't quite memories because she can't quite remember them.

He speaks again and it is all wrong, wrong, wrong. It is wrong because he should have said worked but he shouldn't have had to. Because Seraphina should not be dead. There should not be a monster with black—no, blue—eyes controlling everything that they do, imprisoning them. Oh, but what is another cell to the one of her body to the one of her mind.

What does she say? How can she possibly answer that question? Yes, no, not anymore? Teiran can't say that she ever worked for Seraphina, rather than alongside her, doing what they both were made to do just in different ways. She wonders if she can work for Seraphina, even in death, whether or not she had in life. She thinks of that snake in the citadel and his pet and then she thinks of the rest of Solterra.

Her people, they have died on those streets and they will die again, but this adversary is not one she can easily put a spear through. Perhaps she should be trying to, regardless. Is her purpose not to protect Solterra? Or perhaps Teiran's purpose is just to be loyal to her, regardless of who rules her. But all she sees are black, black eyes and all she remembers are the pangs of dying breaths. Something inside her, some pillar, it crumbles.

“I don't know.”

Is this what uncertainty feels like? Like grasping at some unsteady thing as though it might give you purchase against the even more unsteady ground beneath your feet. The creature inside Teiran is desperately trying to fill all the cracks and holes in her. Trying to stop the onslaught of these things that she is not prepared for. She can never be prepared for them, not truly, but she has still fallen into a deep darkness of self-preservation.

Seraphina is dead and the throne is black and blacker still and there is fire in the capital and the screams of the dying are in her ears and Jahin's eyes are purple, then blue. Gold and then black. And Teiran is back on that street with impossibly high buildings when she puts a name to the wave building inside her. “I don't know,” she says again, quieter, hushed. Child-like.

She is lost.

"Speaking."